Not sure where else to get an answer, so I’ll post an open question here and see if anyone who is responsible for the UA website is reading the list.
While I’ve not tracked it, it seems to me that send message feature of the moderation queue has been broken for the better part of a year. The lack of a functional send message in the moderation queue has a number of consequences:
- Rather than reject questions, moderators are using Send Message to leave a comment with the message with the hope the OP left the question open in the browser. Only about 1 in 25 OPs pickup these messages, and the queue is cluttered.
- Due to the lack of a send message, some moderators will only reject questions with blatant issues meaning more ‘junk’ appears on the list.
- OPs have their questions just disappear, sometimes re-asking the same question a few times before giving up.
- Since the only other solution is for a question to disappear, there is a bias to publishing questions that need work (usually more context).
- There are a lot of questions that need to have the code formatted. There is no way to send the question back to have the OP fix the problem. Either the question disappears, is published and often receives thumbs down and pithy comments, or those of us with enough karma, end up fixing them all the time.
- Clear duplicate questions and trivial questions that that a moderator could answer with a link or short comment, are either published (to the detriment of UA), or just disappear (to the detriment of the OP).
- Questions that need to be directed to Unity Forms either disappear (from the OPs point of view) or are publicly close on the list.
In the end the lack send message means the experience of OPs on UA is pretty random, sometimes published, sometimes closed, sometimes the questions just disappears for no know reason.
Is there any way to expedite a fix for this feature of UA? If there are technical or security reasons for not fixing this feature, could some alternate be established…like having rejected messages appear in a persons list of questions?
(Edit by Graham: I’m talking with the lovely folks from dZone who run the site for us. They’ll work something out.)
(Edit by Robert for Graham: Thank you. Thank you. Most of UA’s fobiles I can either ignore or work around, but this bug has a significant impact on the moderators’ work, quality/nature of what questions make it through moderation, and on the people asking questions (especially the ones rejected). If there are security or technical issues that make the current mechanism difficult to fix, any mechanism that allows reliable communication is acceptable. Any help you can give to facilitate this fix is most appreciated.)
(Edit by Robert for Graham or Aurore: It has been two months since the original question and five weeks since the my last edit here. Any progress? Can you explain why this is so hard to fix? If a fix is not coming soon, is an alternate solution possible like leaving rejected questions in the OPs list of asked questions for a time?